


The Basement, the God, and the Time-Ship

by Maker_of_Rune_Vests



Category: Loki (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, F/M, Gen, inspired by the loki tv series, you can interpret the relationship between Loki and reader as either romantic or platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 09:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20240764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maker_of_Rune_Vests/pseuds/Maker_of_Rune_Vests
Summary: A reader-insert one-shot inspired by rumors about the Loki Disney+ series and particularly by the conundrum of how he will use the Space Stone to time-travel.





	The Basement, the God, and the Time-Ship

LOKI ESCAPES WITH TESSERACT

You check the news every morning while your coffee brews or tea steeps, depending on which you are in the mood for. This morning, the entire first section of Google News is announcing that Loki, the invader of New York, the alien who looks precisely like your mysterious friend Locke whom you have not seen since January of 2011, is on the loose. 

You tap on a security cam still of him, muzzled, glancing off to the side, a glowing cube in his chained hands, and enlarge it. He  _ is  _ Locke. You have believed that since the second clip you saw of him. 

Locke talked as if he had read too many old books, and did not talk about where he came from. The two of you had met in the vast old library of your college, researching time travel, and had forged a bond as you programmed the circuits of a time-ship--a ship built over five years, a little at a time whenever Locke had visited. But there had been no source of power that could hurtle the ship into the past, and for almost two years it has sat, dusted often, in your basement, and Locke has not come either to experiment on it or to visit you. 

And now, apparently, he is an alien named Loki. And he is an outlaw.

“He is armed and dangerous. The police warn the public not to engage.”

You close the browser window. 

A sudden dinging makes you leap up from your chair and whirl to stare at the bell hanging on the wall behind you. It was Locke’s idea to have a bell in the kitchen that could be rung in the basement; an odd but delightful way for you to know he had arrived to work on the machine. Now it is petrifying. It must be him. Nobody else would be in your basement pulling on that green twine bell-cord; nobody except your dearest friend, who attacked New York three days ago. 

The bell falls silent, and then rings again, lightly, as if he isn’t sure you are home. Or isn’t sure that you will come downstairs. You remember the time when he listened to you rant for fifty minutes about a self-obsessed professor with a Hitler moustache; the time when you passed out thanks to a flu and he stayed until the next day, when you were able to walk without needing to grab furniture; the times you ate hummus wraps together while listing the most intriguing eras of history.

  
  


You take a deep breath, walk out of your kitchen, and half-run down the stairs.

At first you only see the time-ship. It looks like a Viking ship and a computer’s bowels were combined by Willy Wonka, and it is too large to remove from the basement by any means save time-travel...or teleportation.

Speaking of which, something is glowing blue on the other side of the time-ship. Your heart thumps as a tall silhouette with hair erratically jabbing into the space around his head rises in front of it.

“Locke? Um, Loki?” He does not answer, and you slap the light switch.

Well, of course he didn’t answer. He is still muzzled. He lifts a chained hand and points at the muzzle, brows rising. 

You are not sure if you will unchain his hands, or help him escape, but you do not hesitate to grab your toolbox and walk towards him, scanning the muzzle for a closure to unfasten. Loki watches you, hands folded. The tired lines on his face are almost as deep as the wounds on it.

You walk behind him, where the Tesseract glows on your workbench, choose a very small screwdriver, and reach up to pick the lock that holds the muzzle on him. He is too tall for this to be easy, but soon the muzzle springs open and then shrinks into itself, becoming a portable square that Loki catches as it falls. He turns and looks down at you, impossibly pale in the blue light. “Fortunate that I taught you to pick locks.” 

“Why are you here?” Your voice is quiet, and steadier than you expect it to be. 

“I’ve found our power source,” he says, as if that is a sufficient explanation. He reaches past you with a faint clank of chains and picks up the glowing blue cube. “And I am bound for the past. Excuse me.” He brushes past you, holding the Tesseract, and slides open one of the panels that cover the time-ship’s never-powered engine before kneeling to install the cube. 

You stand silently in your pajamas and slippers. “I missed you,” you say. You want him to know that, because in his place you would want to know it. He does not turn, though you see a slight twitch in his shoulders. Something clicks in the engine. “I tried to think you were busy, but I was afraid something had happened to you.” 

Loki gives a dry, quiet laugh. 

Another click, and blue light glares from the open panel and then through every seam and through every translucent part of the time-ship. The engine hums--a sound you had despaired of it making--and your heart leaps. However un-ideal all of this is, it is impossible not to exult at the sight of your five-year craft functioning, ready to fly into the past. Even though you are not anticipating traveling in it. 

Loki closes the panel and rises. 

“I could take those off.” You gesture to the handcuffs. “They might be in your way, when you’re traveling.” Should you help him at all? But if he is malevolent, he will force you to help him. And if he is not….

“Thank you.” Locke always had good manners. He holds out his hands, and you begin picking the locks on his handcuffs. They take longer than the one on his muzzle, giving you time to think, and to realize that he could most certainly pick them himself. For that matter, the muzzle...he’s picked locks he couldn’t see before.

It must be a test to find out whether or not you are willing to help him. But why?

“Why did you really ring for me, Locke?” you ask, opening the second cuff. “You could have opened these yourself. And it wasn’t to ask permission to use the time-ship, because you haven’t asked for it....” And could have taken it without permission. 

Loki looks down at his wrists as he rubs them. “We both wished to see the past. Or have you grown fond of the mediocrity of your realm’s present era?” His voice is startlingly sharp, considering that he is saying that he wishes for your company. 

“I don’t hate the 2010’s, but I would like to see more times...and more realms.”  _ And I wanted to see them with Locke. But Locke was not...Locke wasn’t a murderer.  _

Loki folds his arms and looks at you levelly, and laughs, more sharply than he spoke. “But you’d rather not see them in the company of a murderous, alien outlaw. Impeccably prudent.” He turns away from you and slides open the door of the time-ship, which squeals, unopened for a year. 

“Wait.” You hurry a few steps closer to him and catch hold of his wrist as he is about to climb into the ship. It is an impulsive, inadvisable move. But you cannot lose your chance of seeing history, and you cannot, you absolutely cannot, see your friend vanish into the past with sharp words in his mouth and myriad mysteries encompassing him. 

He pulls his wrist out of your hand, and does not turn around. “I cannot wait long.”

You shake your head. “If the Avengers find you, you can leave before they even get in the house. And the past isn’t going to stop before you reach it.”

“No; it will extend, as ever.” His moods change far more quickly than they did when he was Locke. Now he sounds like the reader of a terrible prophecy already fulfilled. “But if the will of--of the Titan is done, the future will add only horror to it.”

“You aren’t going to the past because of the Avengers,” you realize. You step forward so you can see his face, and are taken aback by his tense pallor. 

He looks down at you with the ghost of the smile he used to give you. “No. And there are those in the past against whom even he would seem weak. I mean to gather them.” 

You nod, believing him. There’s no reason for him to invent this for you; you have no power to stop him, and you doubt he wants your company enough to invent such a quest. And why would he be escaping this...Titan, who has evil plans for Earth? Surely because that Titan had evil plans for him, as well--evil plans that were fulfilled, perhaps, and that metamorphosed a scholar into a slayer. You realize you have been silent for a long time, and close your eyes to think. Do you trust him?

Well, you would not have closed your eyes, scarcely a foot away from him, if you did not. You open your eyes, lift your chin, and clamber into the time-ship. “Are we going to the ancient world?”

“Not if we can avoid it.” Loki takes the other seat and slides the door closed. He looks over at you, one brow raised quizzically. “Why, precisely, did discovering that this voyage is more perilous than you thought sway you to come?” 

A smile spreads across your face. “That wasn’t what swayed me.” You push a switch, gunmetal dark, and the time-ship wholeheartedly hums. Scarcely audibly, you hear your doorbell upstairs as the screen in front of Loki wakes up.

Loki begins tapping at it with both hands, brows drawn together. “What did?”

You hold your hand above the button that will reverse the march of time. “That you are still my friend.”

Loki taps one last time on the screen and puts his hand over yours, giving you a sudden smile that is almost as gentle as those he gave you a year ago or six years ago. “960 AD.” The doorbell rings again.

You smile back at him. “960 AD. Any chance they’ll overlook my pajamas?”

Together, you press the button. 

Light as blue as shadows on snow hurtles a god and a human back a thousand and fifty-two years. 

**Author's Note:**

> I looked up Loki's birth year, 965, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki.


End file.
